I haven’t been any good at writing or anything lately, and feel so unlike myself, so I thought I would just write tonight, and see what dumped out.

This evening, I went to a champagne tasting at a winery I like downtown to celebrate Bastille Day, a day I didn’t actually know about until I looked it up just now to write this blog. Well, I take that back: I had heard of a holiday called Bastille Day, but I didn’t know why it was celebrated, even though I made a joke to Josh this very morning about getting the guillotines ready for my mother’s awful neighbor lady, and her unemployed adult son’s 50k new car. I had seen the promotion on facebook, though, and I very much like champagne, so it seemed like a good treat for myself upon arriving alone from a weekend at my parents house, plus a fine way to celebrate France winning the World Cup. For once, I didn’t follow soccer this year, but it seemed my mom and brother were supporting Croatia, so I adopted France to be argumentative when we were watching the final. This is a great example of the many flaws in my personality.

It turned out, my ignorance didn’t end at history; it wasn’t a tasting at all, but just a champagne the winery happened to be featuring. Between my work for the happy hour club and my low key wine problem, I personally know all the owners of wine businesses in my tiny town. They are all named Susan or Nancy, are handsome, older women, and like me. Susan at this winery lamented to tell me I had dumbly misunderstood her facebook posts on the subject, but gave me some free tastings anyway. Then, because of how I feel guilty when someone is nice to me, I felt like I needed to buy something.

The problem was, I had forgotten to bring the depressing book I had been planning to read, and deliberately left my phone as a kind of self-improvement exercise that I wasn’t sure the point of. Now even more I regretted it, because they were only selling the champagne by the glass, I had already told Susan that I had come in expressly for champagne, and I didn’t feel like I could just leave.

Then, I remembered that the winery featured an upstairs art gallery. Sometimes, on bleak winter Sundays, I have convinced my friends to come there and hold court for an afternoon. The gallery itself is a bright, wood-floored attic room shaped like a honeycomb cell, with big windows. Since it offers full directional views of Staunton, it’s a fun place to monopolize, pace, scheme, and fill up with echoing loudness. There is a long, beautiful Last Supper Style-esque table. And art, of course, the art.

I like art okay, but I am not so experienced at walking around alone, thinking carefully and quietly about art for the time it takes to drink one champagne glass, which for me, isn’t even very long. On first glance, it looked like a lot of wavy trees painted by someone who didn’t much love for the woods. Or maybe she liked them as an idea, but didn’t really have a lot of first hand knowledge of them, the way that some people will insist so much more loudly about an interest they never actually spend any time on. They were loud trees. Her artist’s statement used that word specifically.

Thinking about the trees, the nature of the trees, and connections, I remembered how over the weekend, my father had advised me about my favorite catalpa tree in my yard. We were both lightly drunk so I was talking too much about what I liked about this tree: a squat, little globe-shaped mound of catalpa leaves, effectively bonzai’d by the power company having shaved it down to the height of the lowest telephone wire some years before we moved in. It created a stooped, cute effect, like a Miyazaki grandfather monster, and I hung lanterns accordingly, planted up the underside with hosta, spiderwort, wood poppy, Japanese painted fern, and lenten rose.

Upon hearing all my misguided love, my father shook his head, and told me, “You don’t understand: that tree still thinks it’s 30 foot tall.”